It's easy to do some basic contextual Google or Facebook ads on topics we like to discuss here. PTA is an obvious one but we can pick some other filmmakers and topics and invite people to join the discussion.

I might be in the minority here, but I feel that if people had conversations in relevant threads rather than in the shoutbox, we'd have better engagement on certain topics - with or without new membership. Call me Mr. Old-Fashioned.

Also, while I'm not against encouraging new blood to sign up, I do like the small, exclusive feel we have now. Drumming up new members in the run-up to new PTA seems to make sense, but could also consider FB ads targeting people who follow stuff like Mubi, Film Comment, etc. to ensure we have pedigree snobs ;)

Do we have any analytics to see what sort of searches most commonly bring newbies here? JB's Inland Empire essay seems to frequently encourage new people to visit and engage, for example. If we had some other good thought pieces like that we could use as the promotional item - it's far less spammy to see a FB ad which is sharing an article like that than simply a promo to join a forum. GT has written some good stuff too, and I'm sure there's others.

I might be in the minority here, but I feel that if people had conversations in relevant threads rather than in the shoutbox, we'd have better engagement on certain topics - with or without new membership. Call me Mr. Old-Fashioned.

I agree with this actually because I have never really used or looked at the conversation in the shoutbox. I always just look at the threads. So if there is anything interesting going on there I'm missing it...

Also the threads are so much better because it stays there forever. For example, I only watched all of GoT last year, and given I was binging 6 seasons and I couldn't really talk to people about it to avoid spoilers, all I could do was to follow old posts about episodes on the thread to see how people felt about what was going on. It was a great companion to watching the whole thing. Can't do that with whatever is being discussed on shoutbox.

The shoutbox is emblematic of how the internet has changed, for all the obvious reasons. Sometimes people just want to pop in and say a thing. Sometimes they don't feel like they have a large enough thought to constitute a whole post.

To that point, I don't think we should be afraid to say a brief dumb thing in an actual post. I've done that plenty.

Originally our shoutbox was pretty garbage, but the quality of the conversation has increased so much since then. If you view the shoutbox as content, it's undoubtedly a net positive.

I guarantee a falloff in making posts would have happened regardless of the shoutbox. But the inverse is also true — a lot of stuff in the shoutbox should probably be in an actual thread. If we put more effort/thought into that, I see a good equilibrium being achieved there.

Agree with pimping on reddit, but have you been to Paul's subreddit? There are like 3 people that post there and no one comments, its sad. We should infiltrate /Kanye or or /BigDickProblems or something.

I guarantee a falloff in making posts would have happened regardless of the shoutbox. But the inverse is also true — a lot of stuff in the shoutbox should probably be in an actual thread. If we put more effort/thought into that, I see a good equilibrium being achieved there.

I think so too. If you look at the stats, the amount of posts has been in decline for the last 10 years and not just since the shoutbox.

The shoutbox today is basically what the Idle Chatter thread was a decade ago. The minus is that what's posted in there doesn't add to the board in any permanent way, which lends to the perception that board activity is dying off; the plus is that it's really fostered a feeling of actual, unfiltered, almost real-time, conversation. I would be all for a push to move some of these conversations into threads, because there has been some really great in-depth discussion in there that's lost to the ages now.

^ Agree with that. I've sometimes just quoted things from the shoutbox right into threads and continued the conversation there.

Let's take a step back, too. I've looked around... the internet is littered with dead and abandoned message boards that were once thriving. Social media and Reddit have nearly killed the platform, with only a handful of exceptions, most of which are connected to a main website that gets constant traffic. In light of those realities, I think we've done pretty well.

I might be in the minority here, but I feel that if people had conversations in relevant threads rather than in the shoutbox, we'd have better engagement on certain topics - with or without new membership. Call me Mr. Old-Fashioned.

i'll call you a dreamer. there isn't evidence of better engagement from shoutbox or the forum. there's the same amount of engagement, which is limited. wilder and i for example continue to talk of movies and we have each other.

The shoutbox is a nice middle ground between the immediacy of Reddit and the feeling of community that allow message boards. But I've recently tried to find a thread instead of writing directly in the shoutbox.